You really have to think outside the box for Chris' tournaments. If you have a good training director who is willing to try all sorts of crazy stuff with your dogs then you will be ready for a MAD event.

If you only do the patterning for PSA you won't do all that well.

Demo did pretty well, expecially for his first compititon with Connor, but we have done a good deal of varied training with Connor and the other security dogs. I don't think the average PSA dog would have had a chance at Frostbite.

Michelle

Inside me is a thin woman trying to get out. I usually shut the bitch up with a martini.

I have never put a lot of thought into defining what I considered a "working dog" before this.

To me a working dog was a dog that was trained to complete a specific task, whether it was police, protection, service or therapy work.

Webster defines work as

work 1 a : to exert oneself physically or mentally especially in sustained effort for a purpose or under compulsion or necessity b : to perform or carry through a task requiring sustained effort or continuous repeated operations

Since I started training Birdie and learned more about dog training, I've expanded that to include agility, obedience, flyball etc, because the dog is training to a specific task, so in my mind it is working.

Moral courage is the most valuable and usually the most absent characteristic in men ~ General George S. Patton, Jr.

She taking all the stars down from her sky to hang them up someplace new, where there's better weather and the sky's a different blue. ~ Autumn Fields

Too bad, I thought you were talking about PSA. I dont usually pattern train for anything, regardless of the sport. I dont think it teaches the dog enough. No matter the sport. I train harder so that competition is comparetively easy.
Chris' stuff sounds like the bomb though.

Thats interesting... the webster' definition... I never thought of that.
I think anyone who does a lot of any kind of training would think of it as work. I think of it as FUN work!

"Pedigree indicates what the animal should be;
Conformation indicates what the animal appears to be;
But, Performance indicates what the animal actually is."
- author unknown

Because we do security work and one of our members has done some military handling we are a little less patterened than some clubs. Demo and I have been picking Chris' brain on ideas for this to make our dogs sronger and more confident.

Do we still pattern train? Well, yes, but we're getting better.

Michelle

Inside me is a thin woman trying to get out. I usually shut the bitch up with a martini.